Tom Doyle :: TALK

Is that what Miss South Carolina is saying???

Funny reponse from Miss SC to a question in Miss Teen USA 2007.

Just a bit of self promotion, I guess it’s allowed on my own blog!!!

We’re holding a seminar called “Boost Your Sales with Internet Marketing” on the 20th of September 2007 in the Stillorgan Park Hotel. The seminar will cover the main areas of online marketing including:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Google Adwords
• Email Marketing
• Blogging for businesses
• etc

The event will cost €249 (inclusive of VAT) and is packed into a half day event. For more information visit http://www.2bscene.ie/boost-sales-internet-marketing.html

Or of course, you could simply email me

Probably the most bizarre name for an MP3 player, although they insist the name will change before it’s release later this week, TrekStor have unveiled thier new MP3 Player, i.Beat Blaxx.

 I’d love to know what genius marketing guy though up that name….. http://www.trekstor.de/en/products/detail_mp3.php?pid=74

A new site has been lauched dedicated to exposing bad drivers on Irish roads. http://shitedrivers.com/

I don’t know if it will help, but at least someone is making an effort to rid Irish roads of dangerous drivers. Although, there is one thing the government could do to help speed up the process…. change the provisional license law….

I wrote what turned out to be a fairly topical blog post on the new Colm and Jim-Jim breakfast show on 2FM when it first aired back in March. The post can be read here.

A few people thought I was insane at my views on the new show. Some went as far as to predicted that the show would hit 250,000 listners in the next JNLR figures.

Well unsurprisingly (for me at least), the latest JNLR figures show that the Colm and Dim-Jim show have lost 6,000 listeners since taking over from Marty Whelan’s slot since March. This will make it very interesting to see the end of year JNLR figures…..

I do hope for their sakes, that they can ressurect this loss. I was a huge fan of the show on FM104, but since moving to 2FM, I’ve just felt it has been extremely poor and a very irritating show.

Every time I visit another country, I’m always proud to be known for being Irish. If someone dares ask “are you from England?” I get highly offended!!!

However, on holidays this year, there were occassions where I felt ashamed to be Irish. The main case in point was the typical Irish holiday goer, in a bar, having a sing a long with other nationalities including english.

They proceed to sing “The Fields of Athenry”…..

In the chorus it goes….. “Low lie the fields of Athenry, Where once they watched the small free birds fly”. At this point there is an ad-lib chant from the Irish, “Hey baby let the freebirds fly!”. Nothing wrong with that, you think….

But they go on to the next line “Our love was on the wing” and the chant gets slightly more republican with the chant … “Sinn Fein!”. All well and good if you are not up with Irish politics….

It’s the final part that makes me cringe everytime I hear it on holidays…. and it’s usually from young people that obviously don’t know the full history and probably don’t even know the Irish national anthem…. Anyway, the song continues with…”we had dreams and songs to sing” and these ignorant fools chant ….. “IRA”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as republican as the next and I love my country, but why do they insist on doing this? Do they care about anyone else aroung them? How they may have been affected by the troubles???? Rant over….  

I’m just back from a last minute holiday to the sun. In the past I would have gone to any destination, just go get away but this time it was different, we had our little baby girl to think about.

After much whinging at the missus to get her to organise a holiday away with me, I finally gave up pestering her about it and told her I wasn’t going away this year since she didn’t seem that pushed….

Well that was definitely the wrong thing to do, she was now determined to go on holidays and took it on herself to go off and book the holiday. I got a phonecall from her on the Thursday afternoon, “all booked, we’re going to Rhodes on Sunday…..”. I was stunned!! What hotel, what resort i asked??? “Well that’s why I’m ringing you”, she said. “Can you look up the Tsappi Hotel in Kremasti, Rhodes”, that’s where we are staying.

So off I went researching the place and the hotel. There was plenty of information on the location, located just 10 MINUTES from the airport, small village, not much to do etc….. I could find absolutely nothing about the hotel itself. At this stage I was quite worried, we were bringing a 3 month old baby to a place that sounded like a hole and it looked like the hotel didn’t even exist! Anyway, I just thought, feck it, I’ll deal with it when I get there, at least I know not to expect much.

When we arrived in at the Tsappi Hotel, it was obvious right away that it wasn’t a hotel at all. It was merely a nice name for a set of apartments. From the outside they were clean and modern looking compared to the other buildings around this deserted little village. On the inside, not too bad either clean enough, but no air conditioning. This was obviously worrying as our little baby was already sweating with the heat. In an attempt to cool her down, I went out onto the balcony with her. Only sitting for two seconds, I could see what looked like headlights of a Juggernaut heading towards me. I knew though that there we no roads in the direction i was looking. Pretty quickly it became apparent though, that this in fact was a very low flying plane, heading right in our direction. In fact we were right in the path of planes landing at the airport. Just to give you a flavour of how close, you can view the video below, or just look at this on Google Maps (below - click to enlarge)…… The second swimming pool to the right of the airport is the Hotel Margaret, which was just a few yards away from where we were staying.

View Larger Map

Oh, and the video evidence…. this was taken on my mobile phone and is on it’s side. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX59NcvjDIo

There was absolutely nothing else to do on the holiday, granted the beach was nearby and the main village was about a five minute walk (through a housing complex).  The village was lovely, but very little there. Prices weren;t much cheaper than here in Ireland for eating and shopping, but the beer was cheap!

All in all, unless you are looking for a complete flaking out session don’t go here and oh if you think airplanes flying over your head every 60 seconds, with between 15-20 min intervals, steer clear of this place!!

Well it looks like some sad old git has a gripe with me and it’s obvious who it is……..

I’ll let the rest of you make up your own minds, but this person has been quite determined to get their point of view across in some fashion. He won’t give his real name, preferring to go by the name of Frte and he leaves the same ip all the time… http://www.ripe.net/whois?form_type=simple&full_query_string=&searchtext=83.64.118.178

I began receiving abuse through one particular post about a self proclaimed web design company and it even went as far as an abusive email through my company website, which really has nothing to do with this blog.

So what’s their gripe? Not sure right now. The person has been so bad a getting their point across, that the first few posts against the original article, I deleted because I thought it was just spam!! Even when I received the email through the company website, I still didn’t realise it wasn’t spam!

Now they’ve felt that it was well worth their time to create a special blog about how such a bad blogger I am by creating a special blog which is so far dedicated to me http://badpost.blogspot.com/

He starts by stating [edited to make sense]:

“it’s obvious that the poster [didnt] read what “copyleft” is. don’t be mad when reading his posting even in this century, in the new millennium we still can find a human like him. btw, thanks to him, he succeeded making the internet colorful.”

I’m really not sure what he means by this, I know what copyleft is and i don’t think that that makes me a bad human being…. does it???

He then goes on to slag off a post called “Googles recommendations for handling duplicate content“……

Well whoever we know you are - I’m on holiday now, but thanks for the dedicated blog, I’m honoured!
 

Well that’s what they claim anyway. Blackle.com aims to save energy by presenting a Google Search Engine in darkness. The search engine uses the Google Custom Search Engine service. On the about page of their website they say:

“Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.”

However, on Google’s official blog they claim that this is untrue. On Google’s blog post they mention that a recent study showed that showing black on a flat-screen monior actually increases energy usage.

But I have to say at least someone is attempting to make websites use less energy. I have a client who works as a consultant for Sustainable Development projects. Although he is fully converted to using recycle paper etc, he still wastes a lot of space and makes his webpages extremely large against our best advice. It would be nice to see if websites could actually be built in a way to save energy……

For years I had been a big fan of the MySQL-Front tool, which gave you a nice GUI for connecting and viewing MySQL databases. But unfortunately, it was discontinued apparently due to being forced OFF the market by MySQL AB - www.mysqlfront.de

I had stored a really old copy of it on my machine for years - but this no longer works properly with the latest version of MySQL. So I was stuck with using the official MySQL Query Browser, which I never thought was half as good as MySQL-Front.

But thankfully my bro - pointed out a new product, very similar (i think its the same with new features and a new name!) called HeidiSQL - every developer using MySQL should have this in their tool box!!!